Have You Passed Through This Night?
by giveyourimmortalitytome
Summary: Johnny hadn’t been charged with anything – he’d been as much of an innocent bystander as the Yorke kid had been. On paper, at least. [Johnny DiMarco postRTT OneShot] RR totally appreciated!


A/N: Hey, guys. This is just a little one-shot I popped out about Johnny DiMarco, one of the Lakehurst thugs. He was present throughout most of the 'war', and was the kid who said 'Man, what the hell did you do?' right after the red-head stabbed JT. This fic deals with what happened through his perspective, the reasons behind the Lakehurst-Degrassi rivalry, and repercussions of JT's death from the other side. Hope you enjoy!

PS: Degrassi, not mine. Title and lyrics, not mine. (Explosions in the Sky – check them out, they're totally kickass.)

_Is this darkness in you, too?_

Johnny DiMarco wasn't a bad kid.

Yeah, sure, he drank. He partied. So what? He liked to have a good time. And, yeah, some would say he ran with a sketchy crowd. But he'd known these kids since elementary school, and they weren't bad, either. At least, not really. They, too, enjoyed the benefits that came with easy access to fake IDs and lazy parents – and was there anything wrong with that? Hardly. Kids across the country toked up and fucked up and got into fights. It was no big deal. He was seventeen – eighteen in two months. It was his fucking job to be a dumbass.

He'd been careful to never go too far. He'd still done his homework – most of the time. Sure, he wasn't honor roll material, but he was graduating. He'd done the dishes when his mom asked him to, mostly, and not beat up his little brother that often. He never hooked up with his friend's ex-girlfriends, no matter how drunk he was, and he had always avoided any _real_ trouble. He'd been suspended a few times, yeah, but for lame stuff: talking back in class, punching the kid who stole his wallet, smoking on-campus. There had always been a line; a line that Johnny never crossed.

But then the whole Degrassi thing had started. Up until that point, Johnny had always hated Degrassi. It was a given – everyone at his school did. Degrassi kids were rich snobs who beat Lakehurst at every sport ever invented. And after the shooting, everyone loved them: those poor children, who'd narrowly avoided getting gunned down by a crazy bastard. The fucking school was famous across fucking Canada for the fucking 'tragedy.' Sympathy poured in. They were in the paper every day for months – 'Degrassi Kids Grow Through Grief'; 'Degrassi's Spring Production Proves This School Can Bounce Back'; 'One-Year Anniversary of Local Tragedy Brings Back Painful Memories'. Kids from that fucking school got sad glances and discounts at local stores. Locals were nice to Degrassi kids by default – after all, look at what they _survived._

Everyone seemed to forget that the kid had probably had a fucking good reason to bring the gun to school. So maybe Degrassi wasn't such a fucking great place to be every day, if it inspired that kind of thing, right? Besides, Lakehurst had everything Degrassi did – musicals with pansies dancing around in tights (not that Johnny had ever actually _been_ to one, but, well, you get the point); kids winning awards and getting scholarships and whatever the fuck smart kids did with their time. Science fairs and championship games and all the high school crap. Lakehurst was just as good as Degrassi in nearly every respect (except for the sports part, Johnny had to admit) – but were _they_ ever on the news or in the papers? Only once – a couple of kids who Johnny saw sometimes at parties got majorly busted for dealing. That same week, there had been some sort of gay year-end thing at Degrassi. There had been a full color spread in the paper: girls waving their arms around and some queer in a top hat.

In Toronto, Degrassi kids were sad and misunderstood; Lakehurst kids were addicts and idiots. Now _that_ was social elitism for you there (despite what others may have told you – Johnny did pay attention in class, sometimes). Degrassi, the school on the rich side of town? Universally loved and pitied. Lakehurst, the school on the other side of the tracks (so to speak – there wasn't actually a train station within twenty miles of either school)? Looked down on and feared and growing weed behind the science wing.

Bottom line, Johnny had never been a fan of Degrassi Community School. That much was obvious. And, sure, he'd made a few cracks here and there about putting some DCS bitches in their place and fucking some hot rich DCS chicks and whatnot. That kind of thing was to be expected. He'd never actually planned on taking any _action. _Although his permanent record may have given you a different impression, Johnny only believed in violence when it was in the name of self-defense.

That's why he'd had no problem with the fight at the basketball game in the beginning of the year: they'd started it. Okay. So Nic had started it, by saying all that shit. But the Yorke kid had thrown the first punch which, in Johnny's eyes, placed the blame squarely on his shoulders. So Johnny had fought back. Nothing serious happened, unless you counted Nic's so-called warning to Yorke and his fag friend with the glasses. At the time, Johnny had thought it was a pile of horse shit – just Nic being Nic, making shit up and threatening people and pretending to be a bad ass. He'd never expected anything to actually come of it.

But, then, when the Yorke kid had showed up at their school – on _their _turf – and asked for a fight? By agreeing, Johnny and his friends had only been defending… whatever. Their school. Their reputation. Something grand and epic like that. So, when he'd pussied out, beating up his lame friend had seemed like the natural next step. A bit much, Johnny later realized, but they hadn't done too much damage. Kid's arm would only be in a cast for a couple of weeks, right? It would all be forgotten by then, anyway, once Nic got over Mia and moved on to his next vengeful obsession.

Nic had done that, actually – moved on. He'd gotten a new girlfriend who called him twice an hour, and soon was focused solely on avoiding the bitch and cheating as often as humanly possible. He'd been off screwing some freshman, that night, when Johnny and Drake caught wind of a party at some Degrassi bitch's house. For lack of anything better to do, they'd showed up.

It was pretty lame, in retrospect – being the drug dealers and idiots that they were, Lakehurst kids threw some pretty sick parties. Degrassi's little keg and pathetic stack of six-packs could hardly compare. But there was nothing to do on their side of town, so Johnny and Drake stayed and amused themselves. But then they'd played a stupid prank – the shaken beer can; honestly, who _hasn't_ seen that one before? But the Degrassi kids couldn't take a joke and threw them out. Whatever. The two boys hadn't been all that upset – it had been a shitty party, anyway. Mia Jones, that psycho bitch, hadn't even been there, so it wasn't like they could hang out and harass her.

Drake was totally wasted and insisted on stopping at some crappy car to take a leak before heading over to Johnny's house to smoke weed and play Halo. It was shortly post-piss that the Yorke kid wandered outside – God knows why. Probably lonely after a night of getting rejected by frigid Degrassi chicks.

Johnny hadn't planned on actually _doing_ anything to the kid. Their pseudo-war was long over; Johnny had never really had that huge of a problem with him in the first place. Drake, however, had always been much more fanatical about Nic's various rivalries – mix it in with his dangerously high blood alcohol content that night, and you were asking for fucking trouble.

Johnny knew what Drake was like – loose cannon, kind of sketchy, one of the only kids in Johnny's group with an actual record – but even he had been scared shitless by what came next. The Yorke kid had made some wiseass remark – Johnny hadn't been listening, he had an extremely short attention span – and Drake had whipped out his switchblade. Before Johnny could do anything about it, he'd shoved it up the Yorke kid's gut. Johnny was standing in front of them when it happened; he'd watched as Yorke had slowly turned around, blood spilling from his back, and slid down against his crappy car. Johnny had watched as the life seeped from his eyes.

Drake soon realized what he had done and took off. Johnny, left with no other options, quickly followed. They'd charged down the street, pushing past the chick that'd later helped convict Drake. They'd spent the night at Johnny's house, dousing the switchblade with bleach and freaking out.

The cops showed up the next day – Damien Hollander, who'd randomly also been at the party, had given their names. Johnny had been taken in for questioning; he'd sat in the little room, staring blankly at some old guy, until word came that Drake had confessed. Squealed like a canary, if you were into mob movie clichés. God knows why. Johnny always figured that Drake's whole badass act was a total front – guess this proved it. Drake could fuck up and break things and talk shit all he wanted – but faced with an actual crime, with literal and figurative blood on his hands? He couldn't deal.

His ass was tossed directly into the local jail, $10,000 bail. Charged with second-degree murder, he was still waiting for a trial. Luckily, he was only seventeen and getting tried as a kid. Hopefully, he'd end up in some rehab taking anger management classes and talking about his shitty home life to a shrink.

Johnny visited him once. Drake was in the classic orange jumpsuit, to match his bright red hair. Johnny had put the phone to his ear and rambled on about life back at Lakehurst. Drake had been visibly shaken; he'd hardly said anything, which was weird. Usually, and especially when he was wasted, you could hardly shut him up. Prison was fucking with him, big time.

Johnny hadn't been charged with anything – he'd been as much of an innocent bystander as the Yorke kid had been. On paper, at least.

He couldn't sleep. He would lie in his bed for hours and hours each night, staring at the ceiling and clutching his sheets, sweat dripping from his forehead. He'd listen to the ambulances screeching in the distance and conjure up nightmare after nightmare of what he had witnessed. He'd fill in the blanks of what happened after he'd ran off – the Degrassi chick who'd stumbled upon the body, eyes glazed over and body limp. He imagined her covered in blood; the Yorke kid lying deathly still in a coffin. He'd shut his eyes and wonder where he was now – heaven? Hell? He'd never been a believer in that sort of thing, but this kid had to be in heaven. He was seventeen – how bad could he have been in seventeen years? What sort of damage could he have done? (Drake was seventeen. Drake had killed someone. Oh, fuck. Never mind.) The kid had been murdered at seventeen, Christ – he fucking _deserved_ to be in heaven, for that alone.

Johnny would arrive at school the next morning, eyes bloodshot, and doze off in first period history, just like always. Mr. Rickford, who was a total ass, would smack him with his ruler, just like always – and Johnny's head would shoot up. It would always take him a few seconds to fully immerse himself in reality – whenever he closed his eyes, Drake stabbed Yorke all over again.

Although he was made out to be a monster in all the local papers (another notch of delinquency to add to Lakehurst's figurative belt), at school, things were different. Drake Lempke was a hero, a martyr – the one kid who'd finally had enough balls to stick it to Degrassi where the sun don't shine. Johnny, by association, was a fucking legend. Kids he didn't recognize high-fived him in the hallways and vied for a spot near him when he ate lunch in the courtyard. His number of friends on Myspace skyrocketed. He gained a new level of status within his group; second only to Nic – who even stopped making cracks about his kind-of-mullet. If that Sean Cameron bastard (why Johnny even remembered his name after like two years was a total mystery) was Degrassi's poster boy after the shooting, then Johnny was the closest thing to a Lakehurst equivalent. He was famous. He was going down in the history books for what he had witnessed.

But a kid was dead – and no one cared. Granted, Johnny didn't really blame them. They hadn't seen Yorke sink down against his crappy car and watch the life seep out of his eyes.

Johnny had been there, though. And he wasn't ever going to forget it. Never forget the way Drake's blade glinted in the dim light; the sound the fabric of JT's shirt made as it slid down metal. The sharp intake of breath Drake emitted as it hit him what he had done. The repeated thuds of their sneakers as they fled the scene of the crime.

Before that night, Johnny hadn't been all that special. He was just your regular dumbass: drinking, drugs, bad grades. Whatever. Worse – he hadn't cared, about any of it. He'd lived for the rush of adrenaline that came with a really good party, for the good times that followed. Nothing else had ever really mattered.

After that night, though, everything took a complete one-eighty. Johnny's small, stupid world suddenly seemed a lot smaller and more retarded. Things like weed and meaningless hook ups weren't so important, really, once you saw life seep out of another human being. The way Johnny saw it, although only Drake had committed a crime that night, they were both paying for what went down: Drake, sentenced to life without possibility of parole for at least fifteen years; and Johnny, who remained stuck in the real world, going through the motions of life and reliving those moments, that night. every second along the way.

He didn't hate Degrassi kids so much, after that. Mindless hatred had fueled everything that happened. Maybe Degrassi kids got a bad rap. Maybe some of what they said about Lakehurst was at least kind of partly true.

Maybe, someday, he'd forgive himself for what had happened.

James Tiberius Yorke. It was a name Johnny DiMarco would never forget.


End file.
